How Should You Choose Your Career?

Work is a huge part of life. A person who starts work at 25, retires at 65, and works the United States’ average of roughly 2000 hours per year will spend 80,000 hours on the job during their lifetime.

But work is more than just time spent. It provides us with the money we use to live, friends and colleagues who form a community around us, and, for many of us, an identity.

I’ve written a lot about how to make progress in your career, but less on how to choose what you do in the first place. Today I’d like to share some ideas I think would have benefitted me when I was first starting out:

1. Money isn’t everything … The people who think the most important thing in life is to be rich are delusional. Being rich is better than being poor, but being rich doesn’t magically make your life perfect.
2. … but it’s definitely not nothing! At least where I went to school, pretty much everyone was broke (or pretended they were). In such an environment, the major you chose functioned like a badge of personality. In the outside world, different career choices have starkly different degrees of renumeration and difficulty, which can lead to an abrupt transition when you get into “real life.”
3.  College is for proving your abilities; it’s not a substitute for job training. Most of higher education is signaling. That doesn’t mean you don’t learn anything useful, but simply that appearing smart and conscientious (and conformist) is probably the biggest reason college students tend to get better jobs. This means harder majors are more valuable than easier ones, and broad knowledge is probably more useful than highly vocational specializations (which can be risky if the exact job you’ve trained for isn’t available after you finish your degree).
4. Beware of your talents. It’s natural to want to pick a career that highlights your best abilities. But this can be misleading if your best strengths don’t correspond with actual jobs. As an example of this, one paper found that girls’ relatively low participation in STEM originates not from low math ability, but from high reading ability relative to boys!
5. Early jobs are for learning, not earning. A lot of genuine learning happens on-the-job, but not all jobs are created equal. Some will force high performance standards, give you challenging assignments and offer a varied set of work problems. Others will stick you with routine office work that never changes. You’ll learn more in the former, even if it’s (temporarily) stressful.
6. “Cool” careers tend to be overrated. All else being equal, the career paths that look fun, interesting or high-status tend to be more competitive. That might be fine if you’re passionate and highly-ambitious, but it does mean you’re picking a steeper hill to climb than a less-glamorous career in which you do useful work.
7. Be receptive, not passive. Few people I know deliberately chose the specialty for which they are now renowned. Open-mindedness and flexibility about the eventual path your career will take are virtues. But combine that flexibility with a willingness to take on challenges (or make some, if none are offered to you).
8.   Focus on making friends. Despite universal education and online job application boards, most opportunities still flow through personal connections. Doctor’s children are 24x more likely to be in medicine than people whose parents were not doctors. A big part of the reason for this is that the details of a career path are often obscured, and opportunities are hard to find if you don’t know someone who is in a given line of work.
9. Where you work matters more than how hard you work. While ordinary people tend to use the word “productivity” as synonymous with “working hard,” the sense in which economists use it is almost the opposite: high productivity means getting a lot of output for relatively little input. Thus, those who work the hardest are often the least productive in the economic sense. Being in a less productive country, city, sector or company can result in orders-of-magnitude differences in the economic value of your work (and, in turn, your pay and perks), which go far beyond what you can achieve by simply putting in extra hours.

Agree or disagree? Any points of advice you would have given your past self? Share your thoughts in the comments!

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